insight & evidence
By Peter Nicholson – June 23, 2026 This essay is the first in a trilogy inspired by the original short-form article, A Pipeline Isn’t a Field of Dreams, published June 29, 2026, on SAGE Canada | Substack. Read part two and part three. The push for a major new pipeline connecting the oil sands to the British Columbia coast has become wrapped in larger symbolism—Is Canada committed to...
Canada and Alberta have agreed on the regulatory rules for a new pipeline. What might it still take for industry to invest in producing the oil to fill it? By Peter Nicholson – July 10, 2026 This essay is the second in a trilogy inspired by the original short-form article, A Pipeline Isn’t a Field of Dreams, published June 29, 2026, on SAGE Canada | Substack. Read part one and part...
In all the hoopla around the July 2 pipeline agreement, little notice has been paid to Ottawa’s reduced demands on the Pathways project partners By Peter Nicholson – July 14, 2026 This essay is the third in a trilogy inspired by the original short-form article, A Pipeline Isn’t a Field of Dreams, published June 29, 2026, on SAGE Canada | Substack. Read part one and part two. Prime...
By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D On September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman, then professor of economics at the University of Chicago and later a Nobel laureate, published an essay in The New York Times Magazine under the headline “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” It became one of the most consequential opinion pieces in the history of capitalism. It supplied the...
By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D Nova Scotia recorded its best GDP growth on record in 2021 — by deliberately not focusing on GDP growth. Here is what that means for the way we measure, report, and govern economic success. In March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood before a crowd at the University of Kansas and delivered one of the most enduring critiques of economic measurement ever put to a...
By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D Drucker saw it coming. Rajan gave us the framework. Now Musk and Trump have made the diagnosis impossible to ignore. What we are living through is not a political crisis. It is the price of a fifty-year war on community. In 1994, Peter Drucker published an essay in The Atlantic that reads today less like analysis and more like prophecy. The Age of Social...
A concept from a Harvard Business Review article transformed a stagnant professional services firm. The same logic — put the people who do the work first, and growth follows — may be exactly what Nova Scotia’s economic policy has been missing. By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D | Contributing to A Better Place Sometime around 2009, I was managing partner of a law...
A Field Guide for Public Servants By Bernard F. Miller KC, ICD.D | Restorative Change Lab Section 36(1)(a) of the Constitution Act, 1982 commits Canadian governments to promoting equal opportunities for the well-being of Canadians. Courts cannot enforce it. But it is not for that reason constitutionally inert. This article argues that it is a genuine constitutional value and that achieving it...
by Peter Nicholson – Canadian Climate Institute: Opening Remarks at 2026 Board Planning Retreat – January 13, 2026 When thinking about the world in which the Canadian Climate Institute will be operating between now and the end of the decade we need to acknowledge, at the outset, that today climate change is not top of the public mind in Canada, or in the United States or in fact in much of the...
By Peter NicholsonA Presentation to the Nova Scotia Offshore Wind R&D Forum; Halifax; September 24, 2025 Good afternoon, and thanks to our organizers, Net-Zero Atlantic, for the opportunity to outline why I believe, passionately but logically, in the nation-building power of Atlantic offshore wind energy. In the two years since publication of a paper for the Public Policy Forum in which I...
insight & evidence